one sexy car from tesla motors, spotted in orange county:
what a cheeky driver! also, a throwback from olden days:
that one was from Ithaca, just outside the farmer’s market.
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after dark!  … I couldn’t move myself to eat this banana after trying to sort out what this sticker meant. And no, I did not visit the website either. have you ever knowingly been given the middle finger by someone you’ve never met? what purpose does it serve to express disappointment in someone else through something like giving the middle finger? why does that so easily light a fuse in others? these thoughts poured through my mind one afternoon a week ago. in a rush to get to a barbecue I had planned in the middle of a rainstorm, I was repeatedly stymied by people failing to plan little things, or forgetting to do something. People make mistakes, and while I was clearly getting a little frustrated by being made late to the barbecue, I didn’t complain. I just asked people to fix the problems quickly. At one point, I had to return to an apartment complex for someone to grab a pair of tongs. No big deal on the having to return– it happens– but as the person came back with the tongs, a woman parked next to me and started to unload stuff from her side-loading van. I very carefully pulled out of my parking space, which elicited a hideous stare from my neighbor. I stopped abruptly, wondering what her malfunction could be. She moved away from my car a bit and I pulled out, looking in the reverse direction. I did see her make some movement though, and while I didn’t catch it, I knew what had happened by my passengers’ reactions. “She just flipped you off!” one person said. I faced front in my seat, while the vermin woman scurried off in the other direction. At this point, I was overwhelmed with anger. It had been building the entire afternoon and this woman had been the last straw. But why? I didn’t know this woman, and there was little logic behind her outburst. I had not wronged her by pulling my car out of the spot while she was next to me, her open door well outside of my path. While I could blame my state of mind, I’m not going to. I’m pinning the whole fiasco on this woman, who showed a moment of thoughtless negative expression. She didn’t know the kind of damage an expression like that could wreak, or perhaps she knew and meant to do it. Maybe she’s desensitized to the meanness of others or perhaps she just lacks empathy, not too unlike psychopathy. I have since this event decided to unabashedly demonize her, as you can see. As I was driving away, my passengers continually barraged me with more stressful questions– “Chris, it’s raining, are we going to have the BBQ still?” “Someone’s calling me, what should I tell them?” The naysayers and doubting Thomas’s fueled the flames. I sat silently, driving to the BBQ site as people asked these questions. I wanted to sort through the situation on my own since I was convinced every other opinion was just adding to the noise. Normally I am a leader that chooses to guide decisions to be made as a collective, but I couldn’t do that here. The situation was altogether too negatively charged, so I cut everyone else out of the equation. Was this as logical as needing to make my own decision, unhindered by the conflicting opinions– or was it that I was temporarily turned away from the opinions of others entirely? I hope my reactions later that afternoon didn’t inspire rage in others. The whole event really makes me think about how powerful even my actions toward a stranger can be. I’m in the process of learning AUTO, a numerical package for solving boundary value problems, continuing solutions of differential equations, and analyzing bifurcations in systems of equations. A quick Google search revealed a page which seemed to have a definitive answer of how I could get my hands on this program, directing me to a website hosted by Concordia University. On the site is a nifty timeline showing the development cycle of AUTO, also displaying how the bifurcation software has undergone several “affiliation” changes. Weird that it’s shifting affiliations so seamlessly, I thought to myself– I couldn’t help but wonder who decides when it’s going to be passed off. However, I assumed that a couple of professors at CalTech and Concordia knew each other, and they agreed on swapping the application back and forth depending on who has a PhD student willing to work on the project. Naturally, I chose the latest version, downloaded it, and started playing around with it. It’s a fairly complicated package, with files like the following cryptic mass being the only user interface for articulating what you want to the machine:
Each of those numbers defines either very important quantities in your system, or tells the computer precisely what you want from its output. However, I’m not too concerned about that– after all, these are my colleagues in applied mathematics we’re talking about here, not computer scientists with time to spend on designing GUIs. This is a serious piece of machinery! So, I hunkered down, read the 232-page manual from cover to cover, followed demos and made test systems. I became fairly proficient in navigating the labyrinth of FORTRAN files and got what I need out of AUTO. Or, so I thought. Last week, I met with my advisor and described how my efforts with a similar tool (written for MATLAB) had been going for our system, a retarded functional differential equation that can’t be handled by AUTO. My advisor replied that, with AUTO, he had resolved some of the issues tangentially related to my system, and proceeded to show me his code. I was shocked when I noticed it was written in C, rather than FORTRAN. “How old of a version of AUTO are you using?” I asked, to which he responded that it was the latest version. I scoffed and thought that couldn’t possibly be the case, but after speaking with my colleagues in TAM I soon realized I was using a version of the program that nobody else was familiar with. Had I stumbled on a beta version? Where was this other program? I sleuthed google for a bit and came up with only this site. Oops, that’s not it– that’s just its old SourceForge page. Ahh, here it is. The official source directly from the author. No, wait, that’s old and there isn’t even an index to the directory. OH OH HERE IT IS! Hey, what’s it doing in the AUTO-07p (FORTRAN software) repository? Open source scientific computing is on a different plane of evil from those functionally-unsupported packages out there, like XMMS. Having worked in an IT environment that was reasonably sane, I have come to expect and appreciate the process through which software evolves. Someone has an idea to solve a problem, and a scope is determined for what the first version will accomplish. A proof of concept is created– which soon turns into a beta (or several betas), and inevitably a product is finished and released. Feedback is built into a list of “bugs” and “feature requests,” and developers continue to maintain the software staying reasonably close to the initial framework and code base. Sometimes a major rewrite is necessary, e.g. when the organization is switching languages, but documentation holds the whole process together. I’ll introduce to you a completely separate scenario. Imagine someone has an idea to solve a problem, and it seems to be about the size of a PhD thesis. This fellow happens to be a graduate student, so he sells the idea to his professor, and in 1976 a project is began to write the application– in FORTRAN. Being that he’s really only writing the application for his dissertation, the only easily-accessible and complete documentation is stored in hardcover bindings at his institution. The software is released to the wild, where some people zealously continue its development. Years later, C becomes a dominant language and another PhD student takes it upon herself to re-write the package. However, the development branch for the FORTRAN version lives on by folks who just can’t let go– it was killed, but just wouldn’t die. It’s zombieware in a new sense of the word. This same story goes for a host of other applications, like Macsyma/Maxima. At least they had the good sense to change the name of the package to signal the divergence. And now, if you will excuse me, I have to go figure out just how divergent these two applications are– and potentially re-learn all of the subroutines for AUTO in C (also known as AUTO2000, whereas the newest AUTO is named AUTO-07p. What iterative naming scheme?). as markedly different as 1 and 0, on and off, dead and alive, light and dark, my existence has two distinct states 1) in which I am obsessively refreshing a certain search on craigslist; or Being that I am currently in state 1), my life is highly unproductive. …sometimes I hate my obsession to haul in the bargain-trophy. |
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